by Mario Puzo
“Wow,” Janelle said.
“He’s too sensitive,” Mrs. Lieverman said.
“He’s sick,” Janelle said.
Mrs. Lieverman nodded.
Janelle said thoughtfully, “Is it because of his two sisters who died in the plane crash?”
There was a scream from Mrs. Lieverman, a shriek finally of outrage and exasperation. “He never had any sisters. Don’t you understand? He’s a pathological liar. He lies about everything. He has no sisters, he has no money, he’s not divorcing me, he used the firm’s money to take you to Puerto Rico and New York and to pay the expenses of this house.”
“Then why the hell do you want him back?” Janelle asked.
“Because I love him,” Mrs. Lieverman said.
Janelle thought that over for at least two minutes, studying Mrs. Lieverman. Her husband was a liar, a cheat, had a mistress, couldn’t get it up in bed, and that’s only what she knew about him, plus the fact, of course, that he was a lousy tennis player. Then what the hell was Mrs. Lieverman? Janelle patted the other woman on the shoulder, gave her another drink and said, “Wait here for five minutes.”
That’s all it took her to throw all her things into two Vuitton suitcases Theodore had bought her, probably with bum checks. She came down with the suitcases and said to the wife, “I’m leaving. You can wait here for your husband. Tell him I never want to see him again. And I’m truly sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. You have to believe me when I tell you that he said you had left him. That you didn’t care.”
Mrs. Lieverman nodded miserably.
Janelle left in the bright new baby blue Mustang Theodore had bought her. No doubt it would be repossessed. She could have it driven back to the house. Meanwhile, she had no place to go. She remembered the director and costume designer Alice De Santis, who bad been so friendly, and she decided to drive to her house and ask her advice. If Alice was not at home, she would go to Doran. She knew he would always take her in.
Janelle loved the way Merlyn enjoyed the story. He didn’t laugh. His enjoyment was not malicious. He just smiled, closing his eyes, savoring it. And he said the right thing-wonderingly, almost admiringly.
“Poor Lieverman,” he said. “Poor, poor Lieverman.”
“What about me, you bastard?” Janelle said with mock rage. She flung herself naked on his naked body and put her hands around his neck. Merlyn opened his eyes and smiled.
“Tell me another story.”
She made love to him instead. She had another story to tell him, but he wasn’t ready for it yet. He had to fall in love with her first, as she was in love with him. He couldn’t take more stories yet. Especially about Alice.
Chapter 31
I had come to the point now that lovers always come to. They are so happy they can’t believe they deserve it. And so they start thinking that maybe it’s all a fake. So with me jealousy and suspicion haunted the ecstasies of our lovemaking. Once she had to read for a part and couldn’t meet my plane. Another time I understood she would spend the night and she had to go home to sleep because she had to get up for an early-morning call at the studio. Even when she made love to me in the early afternoon so that I wouldn’t be disappointed and I would believe her, I thought she lied. And now, expecting she would lie, I said to her, “I had lunch with Doran this afternoon. He says you had a fourteen-year-old lover when you were just a Southern belle.”
Janelle raised her head slightly and gave the sweet, tentative smile that made me forget how I hated her.
“Yes,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
She bowed her head then. Her face had an absentminded, amused look as she remembered that love affair. I knew she always remembered her love affairs with affection, even when they ended very badly. She looked up again.
“Does that bother you?” she said.
“No,” I said. But she knew it did.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked at me for a moment, then turned her head away. She reached out with her hands, slid them under my shirt and caressed my back. “It was innocent,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, just moved away because the remembered touch made me forgive her everything.
Again expecting her to lie, I said, “Doran told me because of the fourteen-year-old kid you stood trial for impairment of the morals of a minor.”
With all my heart I wanted her to lie. I didn’t care if it was true. As I would not blame or reproach her if she were an alcoholic or hustler or murderess. I wanted to love her, and that was all. She was watching me with that quiet, contemplative look as if she would do anything to please me.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked, looking directly into my face.
“Just tell me the truth,” I said.
“Well, then it’s true,” she said. “But I was acquitted. The judge dismissed the case.”
I felt an enormous relief. “Then you didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” she asked.
“You know,” I said.
She gave me that sweet half-smile again. But it was touched with a sad mockery.
“You mean, did I make love to a fourteen-year-old boy?” she asked. “Yes, I did.”
She waited for me to walk out of the room. I remained still. Her face became more mocking. “He was very big for his age,” she said.
That interested me. It interested me because of the boldness of the challenge. “That makes all the difference,” I said dryly. And watched her when she gave a delighted laugh. We had both been angry with each other. Janelle because I dared judge her. I was going to leave, so she said, “It’s a good story, you’ll like it.” And she saw me bite. I always loved a story almost as much as making love. Many nights I’d listened to her for hours, fascinated as she told her life story, making guesses at what she left out or edited for my tender male ears as she would have edited a horror story for a child.
It was the things he loved me most for, she told me once. The eagerness for stories. And my refusal to make judgments. She could always see me shifting it around in my head, how I would tell it or how I would use it. And I had never really condemned her for anything she’d done. As she knew now I would not when she told her story.
After her divorce Janelle had taken a lover, Doran Rudd. He was a disc jockey on the local radio station. A rather tall man, a little older than Janelle. He had a great deal of energy, was always charming and amusing and finally got Janelle a job as the weather girl of the radio station. This was a fun job and well paid for a town like Johnson City.
Doran was obsessed with being the town character. He had an enormous Cadillac, bought his clothes in New York and swore he would make it big someday. He was awed and enchanted by performers. He went to see all the road companies of all the Broadway plays and always sent notes back to one of the actresses, followed up by flowers, followed up by offers of dinner. He was surprised to find how easy it was to get them to bed. He gradually realized how lonely they were. Glamorous onstage, they were a little pathetic-looking back in their second-rate hotel rooms stocked with old-model refrigerators. He would always tell Janelle about his adventures. They were more friends than lovers.
One day he got his break. A father and son duo were booked into the town concert hall. The father was a pickup piano player who had earned a steady living unloading freight cars in Nashville until he discovered his nine year-old son could sing. The father, a hardworking Southern man who hated his job, immediately saw his son as the impossible dream come true. He might escape from a life of dull, back breaking toil.
He knew his son was good, but he didn’t really know how good. He was quite content with teaching the young boy all the gospel songs and making a handsome living touring the Bible Belt. A young cherub praising Jesus in pure soprano was irresistible to that regional audience. The father found his new life extremely agreeable. He was gregarious, had an eye for a pretty girl and welcomed vacations from his already worn-out wife, who, of course, remained home.
But the mother too dreamed of all the luxuries her son’s pure voice would bring her. They were both greedy but not greedy as the rich are greedy, as a way of life, but greedy as a starving man on a desert island who is suddenly rescued and can finally realize all his fantasies.
So when Doran went backstage to rave about the lad’s voice, then proposition the parents, he found a willing audience. Doran knew how good the boy was and soon realized that he was the only one. He reassured them that he did not want any percentage of the gospel-singing earnings. He would manage the boy and take only thirty percent of any thing the boy earned over twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
It was, of course, an irresistible offer. If they got twenty-five thousand dollars a year, an incredible sum, why worry if Doran got thirty percent of the rest? And how could their boy, Rory, make more than that amount? Impossible. There was not that much money. Doran also assured Mr. Horatio Bascombe and Mrs. Edith Bascombe that he would not charge them for any expenses. So a contract was prepared and signed.
Doran immediately went into furious action. He borrowed money to produce an album of gospel songs. It was an enormous hit. In that first year the boy Rory earned over fifty thousand dollars. Doran immediately moved to Nashville and made connections in the music world. He took Janelle with him and made her administrative assistant in his new music company. The second year Rory made more than a hundred thousand dollars, most of it on a single of an old religious ballad Janelle found in Doran’s disc jockey files. Doran had absolutely no creative taste in any sense; he would never have recognized the worth of the song.
Doran and Janelle were living together now. But she didn’t see that much of him. He was traveling to Hollywood for a movie deal or to New York to get an exclusive contract with one of the big recording companies. They would all be millionaires. Then the catastrophe. Rory caught a bad cold and seemed to lose his voice. Doran took him to the best specialist in New York. The specialist cured Rory completely but then casually, just in passing, said to Doran, “You know his voice will change as he goes into puberty.”
It was something that Doran had not thought of. Maybe because Rory was big for his age. Maybe because Rory was a totally innocent young boy, unworldly. He had been shielded from girlfriends by his mother and father. He loved music and was indeed an accomplished musician. Also, he had always been sickly until his eleventh year. Doran was frantic. A man who has the location of a secret gold mine and misplaced the map. He had plans to make millions out of Rory; now he saw it all going down the drain. Millions of dollars at stake. Literally millions of dollars!
Then Doran got one of his greater ideas. He checked it out medically. After he had all the dope, he tried his scheme out on Janelle. She was horrified.
“You are a terrible son of a bitch,” she said, almost in tears.
Doran couldn’t understand her horror. “Listen,” he said, “the Catholic Church used to do it.”
“They did it for God,” Janelle said. “Not for a gold album.”
Doran shook his head. “Please stick to the point. I have to convince the kid and his mother and father, that’s going to be a hell of a job.”
Janelle laughed. “You really are crazy. I won’t help you, and even if I did, you’ll never convince one of them.”
Doran smiled at her. “The father is the key. I was thinking you could be nice to him. Soften him up for me.”
It was before Doran had acquired the creamy, sunlit, extra smoothness of California. So when Janelle threw the heavy ashtray at him, he was too surprised to duck. It chipped one of his teeth and made his mouth bleed. He didn’t get angry. He just shook his head at Janelle’s squareness.
Janelle would have left him then, but she was too curious. She wanted to see if Doran could really pull it off.
Doran was, in general, a good judge of character, and he was really sharp on finding the greed threshold. He knew one key was Mr. Horatio Bascombe. The father could swing his wife and son. Also, the father was the most vulnerable to life. If his son failed to make money, it was back to going to church for Mr. Bascombe. No more traveling around the country, playing piano, tickling pretty girls, eating exotic foods. Just his worn-out wife. The father had most at stake; the loss of Rory’s voice was more important to him than anyone.
Doran softened Mr. Bascombe up with a pretty little singer from a sleazy Nashville jazz club. Then a fine dinner with cigars the following evening. Over cigars he outlined Rory’s career. A Broadway musical, an album with special songs written by the famous Dean brothers. Then a big role in a movie that might turn Rory into another Judy Garland or Elvis Presley. You wouldn’t be able to count the money. Bascombe was drinking it all in, purring like a cat. Not even greedy because it was all there. It was inevitable. He was a millionaire. Then Doran sprang it on him.
“There’s only one thing wrong,” Doran said. “The doctors say his voice is about to change. He’s going into puberty.”
Bascombe was a little worried. ‘His voice will get a little deeper. Maybe it will be better.”
Doran shook his head. “What makes him a superstar is that high, clear sweetness. Sure he might be better. But it will take him five years to train it and break through with a new image. And then it’s a hundred to one shot he’ll make it big. I sold him to everybody on the voice he has now.”
“Well, maybe his voice won’t change,” Bascombe said.
“Yeah, maybe it won’t,” Doran said and left it at that.
Two days later Bascombe came around to his apartment. Janelle let him in and gave him a drink. He looked her over pretty carefully, but she ignored him. And when he and Doran started talking, she left the room.
That night in bed, after making love, Janelle asked Doran, “How is your dirty little scheme coming?”
Doran grinned. He knew Janelle despised him for what he was doing, but she was such a great broad she had still given him her usual great piece of ass. Like Rory, she still didn’t know how great she was. Doran felt content. That’s what he liked, good service. People who didn’t know their value.
“I’ve got the greedy old bastard hooked,” he said. “Now I’ve got to work on the mother and the kid.”
Doran, who thought he was the greatest salesman east of the Rockies, attributed his final success to those powers. But the truth was that he was lucky. Mr. Bascombe had been softened up by the extremely hard life he had led before the miracle of his son’s voice. He could not give up the golden dream and go back to slavery. That was not so unusual. Where Doran got really lucky was with the mother.
Mrs. Bascombe had been a small-town Southern belle, mildly promiscuous in her teens and swept off her feet into matrimony by Horatio Bascombe’s piano playing and Southern small-town charm. As her beauty faded year by year, she succumbed to the swampy miasma of Southern religiosity. As her husband became more unlovable, Mrs. Bascombe found Jesus more attractive. Her son’s voice was her love offering to Jesus. Doran worked on that. He kept Janelle in the room while he talked to Mrs. Bascombe, knowing the delicate subject matter would make the older woman nervous if she were alone with a male.
Doran was respectfully charming and attentive to Mrs. Bascombe. He pointed out that in the years to come a hundred million people all over the world would hear her son, Rory, singing the glories of Jesus. In Catholic countries, in Moslem countries, in Israel, in the cities of Africa. Her son would be the most powerful evangelist for the Christian religion since Luther. He would be bigger than Billy Graham, bigger than Oral Roberts, two of Mrs. Bascombe’s saints on earth. And her son would be saved from the most grievous and easiest-to-fall-into sin on this earth. It was clearly the will of God.
Janelle watched them both. She was fascinated by Doran. That he could do such a thing without being evil, merely mercenary. He was like a child stealing pennies from his mother’s pocket book. And Mrs. Bascombe after an hour of Doran’s feverish pleading was weakening. Doran finished her off.
“Mrs. Bascombe, I just know you’ll make thi
s sacrifice for Jesus. The big problem is your son, Rory. He’s just a boy, and you know how boys are.”
Mrs. Bascombe gave him a grim smile. “Yes,” she said. “I know.” She darted a quick venomous look at Janelle. “But my Rory is a good boy. He’ll do what I say.”
Doran heaved a sigh of relief. “I knew I could count on you.”
Then Mrs. Bascombe said coolly, “I’m doing this for Jesus. But I’d like a new contract drawn up. I want fifteen percent of your thirty percent as his co-manager.” She paused for a moment. “And my husband needn’t know.”
Doran sighed. “Give me some of that old-time religion all the time,” he said. “I just hope you can swing it.”
Rory’s mama did swing it. Nobody knew how. It was all set. The only one who didn’t like the idea was Janelle. In fact, she was horrified, so horrified she stopped sleeping with Doran, and he considered getting rid of her. Also, Doran had one final problem. Getting a doctor who would cut off a fourteen-year-old kid’s balls. For that was the idea. What was good enough for the old Popes was good enough for Doran.
It was Janelle who blew the whole thing up. They were all gathered in Doran’s apartment. Doran was working out how to screw Mrs. Bascombe out of her co-manager’s fifteen percent, so he wasn’t paying attention. Janelle got up, took Rory by the hand and led him to the bedroom.
Mrs. Bascombe protested, “What are you doing with my boy?”
Janelle said sweetly, “We’ll be right out. I just want to show him something.” Once inside the bedroom she locked the door. Then very firmly she led Rory to the bed, unbuckled his belt, stripped down his trousers and shorts. She put his hand between her legs and his head between her now bare breasts.
